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During this year’s PsyGeo Conflux in New York, the artist kanarinka from Boston has devised a project called ‘Funerals For a Moment’ which resonates well with the themes of failure, chance and error in the city. She has asked people to post memories of seemingly insignificant moments on a website with suggestions of how another person might find a way to ‘commemorate their story (e.g. reading of a eulogy, placement of specific objects in certain locations…tackling a passer-by, etc.)’
She asks, ‘why shouldn’t we build elaborate ritualistic ceremonies to commemorate the time and place that we crossed a street…sneezed violently, looked at the sky, said hello, resolved to do it, fell asleep, bought milk, or remembered a fact?’
Dadaist/ Surrealist artist Cahun observed that ‘so many fortuitous, necessary and precarious encounters take place for each of us, that the loveliest or dreariest day of our life could perfectly well go by unnoticed.’ The value in tracing these historical threads, as we have done on this little drift, lies in the prompt to keep our eyes peeled for the unexpected and the marvellous, to memorialise each fleeting moment.
© Colette Meacher. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior permission from the author. All images copyright of the author.
